What to Eat in Brussels: 20 Belgian Dishes to Try (2026)

The dishes to eat in Brussels are moules-frites, Belgian fries, both styles of Belgian waffle, Belgian pralines and carbonnade à la flamande, and every one of them has a Brussels address in this guide. Below are 20 traditional Belgian dishes, what each one is, how it is served, and the counter, fritkot or brasserie to order it from.

Belgian food travels badly. Beyond chocolate, beer and waffles, most visitors cannot name a Belgian dish, and the ones that matter here are the ones nobody exports: eel in a green herb sauce, whelks in peppery broth from a market stall, a baguette spread with raw beef. I put this list together with Alison Cornford-Matheson of Cheeseweb.eu, who wrote a book about eating in this city, and between us we have ordered every dish below more than once.

Belgium is a young country, so “traditional” here means the food Belgians grew up with: some of it ordered at any café without thinking, some of it tied to grandparents and a Sunday table. The addresses are almost all in Brussels, and the four that are not are marked with the distance from the city.

The 20 dishes at a glance

The 20 traditional Belgian dishes to eat in Brussels are listed below, each with what it is and where to order it.

1. Belgian fries (frieten / frites): thick-cut potatoes fried twice, from a fritkot. Maison Antoine, Place Jourdan.
2. Moules-frites (mosselen-friet): Belgium’s national dish, a pot of mussels with a cone of fries. Le Zinneke, Schaerbeek.
3. Belgian waffles (Brusselse wafel / Luikse wafel): two different waffles, one light and one caramelised. Maison Dandoy, Rue Charles Buls.
4. Belgian chocolate and pralines: filled bonbons with a hard shell, invented in Brussels. Pierre Marcolini, Sablon.
5. Carbonnade à la flamande (stoofvlees): beef slow-cooked in dark Belgian beer. Café Novo, Vieille Halle aux Blés.
6. Grey shrimp croquettes (garnaalkroketten): North Sea shrimp in a molten béchamel filling. Noordzee, Sainte-Catherine.
7. Waterzooi: a creamy chicken or fish stew from Ghent, on brasserie boards.
8. Boulets à la Liégeoise and balletjes: meatballs in sweet-sour gravy or tomato sauce. Ballekes, Rue des Chapeliers.
9. Stoemp: mashed potato with a vegetable mashed through it, under a sausage. Fin de Siècle, Rue des Chartreux.
10. Vol-au-vent: a puff pastry case of chicken, mushrooms and meatballs, as a main course. ‘t Cuyperke, Zaventem.
11. Chicons au gratin (gegratineerd witloof): Belgian endive rolled in ham and baked under béchamel. Le Plattesteen, Marché au Charbon.
12. Filet américain and steak tartare: raw minced beef, spread or plated. Les Petits Oignons, Rue de la Régence.
13. Mitraillette: half a baguette loaded with fried meat, fries and sauce, from a fritkot.
14. Martino sandwich (broodje martino): a baguette of raw beef, pickles and spice, from any sandwich bar.
15. Paling in ‘t groen (anguilles au vert): eel poached in a bright green herb sauce. Bij den Boer, Quai aux Briques.
16. Lapin aux pruneaux (konijn met pruimen): rabbit braised with prunes. La Roue d’Or, Rue des Chapeliers.
17. Asperges à la flamande: white asparagus with butter and crumbled egg, April to June. Le Zinneke, Schaerbeek.
18. Caricoles (karakollen): whelks in a peppery broth, in a cup, from a market stall.
19. Speculoos (speculaas): a thin spiced biscuit, on the saucer with your coffee. Maison Dandoy.
20. Smoutebollen (croustillons): fried dough balls under icing sugar, at every fair and Christmas market.

Six of those twenty sit within a fifteen-minute walk of the Grand Place, so one afternoon on foot covers a lot of this list. If you would rather not plan the route yourself, a guided Brussels food tour with chocolate, beer and a waffle does it for you.

Belgian food and Brussels food: what the difference is

Brussels food is Belgian food with both halves of the country on one menu. Belgium has three regions, and its cooking splits along the same line: Flanders in the Dutch-speaking north, Wallonia in the French-speaking south, and bilingual Brussels in the middle, which serves both.

Flanders gives the country its stews and its sea. Carbonnade, waterzooi, grey shrimp croquettes, chicons au gratin and eel in green sauce are all northern dishes, and the North Sea coast supplies the shrimp, the eel and the mussels that go with them. Wallonia cooks with syrup, game and beer from the abbeys: boulets à la Liégeoise, rabbit with prunes, jambon d’Ardenne and sirop de Liège all come from the south.

Brussels sits between the two and keeps both. A brasserie here will put a Flemish stew and a Liège meatball on the same page, and add the city’s own street food on top: caricoles, the martino sandwich, the mitraillette. That is why a list of national dishes belongs on a Brussels page. You can eat almost all of Belgium inside one city.

1. Belgian fries (frieten / frites)

Belgian fries are thick-cut potatoes fried twice, first at a low temperature to cook the inside soft and then hot to crisp the outside, and they are sold from a fritkot in a paper cone with a sauce of your choice. Belgian fries are not French fries, and you will never hear a Belgian call them that, not even in English.

Two things make them work. The potato is a floury variety, usually bintje, cut thick enough to stay fluffy inside. The fat is traditionally beef tallow, blanc de bœuf, which is what gives a proper Belgian fry its savoury edge, though plenty of shops have moved to vegetable oil and will tell you if you ask. The double fry does the rest.

Restaurant fries here beat restaurant fries anywhere else, but the ones worth crossing the city for come from a friterie in French, a frietkot or frituur in Flemish. These range from a wooden shack to a trailer to a small building, and the good ones are argued over locally and voted on every year.

The sauce list is the part that surprises people, and it is almost all mayonnaise-based. Andalouse is the standard, a mayonnaise with tomato and pepper. Samurai is andalouse with chilli, and it is my go-to. Aioli is the garlic one. Then there is curry ketchup, tartare, brasil, americaine and a peanut sauce that has more defenders than you would expect. Ketchup on its own marks you out as a tourist.

Where to eat them in Brussels: Maison Antoine, Place Jourdan 1, 1040 Etterbeek. A fry kiosk since 1948, now run by the third generation, and the queue is the quality signal. Order a cone with one sauce, then carry it into any of the bars on the square, most of which will let you eat it at their tables if you buy a drink.

A second Brussels fritkot, Friture de la Chapelle at Place de la Chapelle, is worth a look, but check before you walk over: its trailer was withdrawn in 2024 under the Brussels-Region programme to replace public fritkots with a new standard design, and it had not reliably reappeared by September 2026.

2. Moules-frites (mosselen-friet)

Moules-frites is Belgium’s national dish: a black cast-iron pot of mussels steamed with white wine, shallots, parsley and butter, served with a cone of fries and mayonnaise on the side. The pot arrives closed, you lift the lid at the table, and the empty upturned shell of the first mussel becomes the tongs you eat the rest with.

White wine is the classic, but the preparations run much further than that: cream, garlic, beer, mustard, curry, or a broth of fish stock. Mussels come as a shared starter without fries, or as a full main course with them. The season runs from roughly July to April, when the North Sea and Zeeland mussels are in; outside it, ask before you order.

Not all mussels are equal, and Rue des Bouchers off the Grand Place is where visitors learn it. Walk past the heaped seafood displays and the waiters who step into the street, and read the warning at the end of this guide before you book anything near that lane.

Where to eat them in Brussels: Le Zinneke, Place de la Patrie 26, 1030 Schaerbeek. A bistro on the heights of northern Brussels since 1956, with more than fifty mussel preparations on one page and 1.1 kg per person in the pot with fries and homemade mayonnaise. Nature, the plain fishermen’s version, is €29.50 (about $32, £25), and most of the rest land between €30 and €33 (about $32 to $36, £26 to £28). The one to order is Mussels Bruxelloise, cooked with Cantillon gueuze, bacon and mushrooms, €32 (about $34, £27). Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

3. Belgian waffles (Brusselse wafel and Luikse wafel)

Belgium has two waffles, not one, and they are different products. The Brussels waffle (gaufre de Bruxelles, Brusselse wafel) is rectangular, made from a light yeast batter, crisp outside and almost hollow inside, and it is eaten with a dusting of icing sugar. The Liège waffle (gaufre de Liège, Luikse wafel) is round with uneven edges, made from a brioche dough studded with pearl sugar that caramelises against the iron, and it is sweet and dense enough to eat plain in the street.

Neither is a breakfast food. Belgians eat waffles as an afternoon snack, standing up, usually with nothing on top. The mountain of cream, sauce, fruit and sprinkles photographed around the Grand Place is a tourist product priced well above the waffle underneath it.

You can get both types from the vans, usually painted yellow, parked at most of the city’s tourist spots. There is also Belgaufra, a Liège-waffle dough maker from Wavre that has been at it for decades and sells its waffles in Brussels as The Waffle by Belgaufra, on Rue des Fripiers just off Place de la Monnaie.

Where to eat them in Brussels: Maison Dandoy Tea Room, Rue Charles Buls 14, 1000 Brussels, steps from the Grand Place. Dandoy is a Brussels biscuiterie founded in 1829 and better known for speculoos, and from the street this looks like its other shops. Two things are different: someone is making waffles fresh behind the counter for takeaway, and a staircase goes up to a tea room where you can sit with one, surrounded by antique speculoos moulds on the walls. The Liège waffle here is my favourite in the city.

4. Belgian chocolate and pralines

A Belgian praline is a filled chocolate bonbon with a hard shell, and it was invented in Brussels in 1912 by Jean Neuhaus Jr, whose grandfather had opened the family’s first shop in the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in 1857. Before that, filled chocolates leaked. The shell is still what you judge a praline by: a good one snaps cleanly and the filling behind it is soft.

Two things are worth knowing before you buy. Anything sold as chocolate in the European Union has to contain at least 35% cocoa solids, so that figure is a floor, not a mark of quality. And “Belgian chocolate” is not a legally protected name, so the shop matters far more than the label does.

Skip the pralines sold by weight around the Grand Place. Walk to the Sablon instead, where Pierre Marcolini roasts his own beans on Place du Grand Sablon and sells single-origin bars beside the pralines. My own lesser-known favourite is Frederic Blondeel, now a combined coffee roastery, chocolate atelier and bar at Rue de Ganshoren 39 in Koekelberg.

Where to buy them in Brussels: the Sablon for Pierre Marcolini and Wittamer, and the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, the arcade that opened in 1847 and still holds the original Neuhaus shop. Buy a box of six to eat that day rather than a kilo to carry home; pralines with fresh cream fillings keep for about a week.

5. Carbonnade à la flamande (stoofvlees, stoverij)

Carbonnade à la flamande is beef slow-cooked in dark Belgian beer until it falls apart, thickened with slices of bread spread thickly with mustard, and served with fries or mashed potato. The Flemish name, stoofvlees or stoverij, translates as “stew meat”, which is an honest description of it.

The beer does the work. A dark brown ale or an abbey beer goes in, the meat cooks for hours, and the sauce comes out rich and slightly sour at the same time. Some cooks add onion, mushrooms or garlic. Many swap the mustard bread for a slice of pain d’épices, Belgian gingerbread, which is what gives some versions their sweet-spiced edge. It is cold-weather food, and one of the few Belgian dishes that comes out better in a plain café than in a smart restaurant. If Alison had to pick one Belgian dish to eat for the rest of her life, this is it.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Café Novo, Place de la Vieille Halle aux Blés 37, 1000 Brussels, five minutes’ walk from the Grand Place. It cooks a traditional beer carbonnade, always serves it with fries, and keeps vegetarian and gluten-free options on the same menu, which is rare in this category.

6. Grey shrimp croquettes (garnaalkroketten)

A garnaalkroket is a deep-fried croquette with a thin, brittle shell and a molten filling of North Sea grey shrimp bound in béchamel, eaten as a starter or a standing snack with a wedge of fried parsley and a lemon. Grey shrimp are tiny, sweet and peeled by hand, and they taste of the sea in a way the pink ones do not.

They also carry a piece of Belgian heritage. Grey shrimp were once caught along the coast from France to the Netherlands by fishermen riding draught horses into the surf, dragging nets behind them. Oostduinkerke is the last place in the world where this is still done, by a dozen households, and UNESCO added shrimp fishing on horseback to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013. If you are on the coast when they ride out, go and watch.

Plenty of Brussels kitchens reheat a frozen croquette. One made from scratch is a different object: the crust shatters, the filling runs. Cheese croquettes, kaaskroketten, are the other standard and are made the same way.

Where to eat them in Brussels: Noordzee / Mer du Nord, Rue Sainte-Catherine 45, 1000 Brussels. A fish counter on Place Sainte-Catherine where you order at the window and eat standing at a shelf outside with a glass of white wine, and where two croquettes cost roughly €13 (about $14, £11). These are my favourite croquettes in Brussels, and the terrace is a local institution in summer. To sit down instead, Les Petits Oignons at Rue de la Régence 25, 1000 Brussels, keeps croquettes aux crevettes grises on its permanent menu.

Tomate crevette, the other way Belgium eats grey shrimp

Tomate crevette, tomaat-garnaal in Flemish, is a hollowed-out tomato packed with grey shrimp in mayonnaise and served cold with fries. It is the second canonical grey-shrimp dish and it appears on brasserie menus as a starter or a light main all summer. Order it between June and September, when the tomatoes are in season.

7. Waterzooi

Waterzooi is a creamy stew from Ghent made with chicken or fish, carrots, leeks, celeriac and potatoes in a broth thickened with egg yolk and cream, and it is served in a deep bowl with bread. The name comes from the Dutch for “watery boil”, which undersells it considerably.

It began as a fish dish made from whatever came out of the rivers around Ghent, and shifted to chicken as the river fish disappeared. Gentse waterzooi, the chicken version, is the one you will meet, and it is what to order when the weather has beaten you.

Where to eat it in Brussels: waterzooi moves between the daily boards of the Belgian brasseries in this guide rather than sitting on a fixed menu at one address. Read the blackboard at Fin de Siècle or the board at La Roue d’Or before you sit down, and ask, because when it is on it is usually the thing to order.

8. Boulets à la Liégeoise and balletjes

Boulets à la Liégeoise are large beef-and-pork meatballs served in a dark sweet-sour gravy made with onions and sirop de Liège, and they come with fries. Sirop de Liège is a thick apple-and-pear syrup, closer to molasses than to jam, and it is what makes the Walloon version taste unlike any other meatball in Europe.

Flanders does the same thing differently. There, balletjes arrive smothered in tomato sauce, or fried in butter and served with a Belgian cherry sauce in the frikadellen style. Both halves of the country agree on the side: fries.

Where to eat them in Brussels: Ballekes, a Brussels meatball specialist with two addresses, Rue des Chapeliers 3 and Rue Sainte-Catherine 37, both 1000 Brussels. It is fast-casual and takes no reservations: you pick your meatball, your sauce and your side at the counter, and it arrives with Belgian fries. There are beef, pork, lamb, chicken and vegetarian versions. For a sit-down brasserie version, Le Bistro – Porte de Hal at Boulevard de Waterloo 138, 1000 Brussels, runs a Belgian menu of mussels, stews and croquettes with vegetarian alternatives.

9. Stoemp

Stoemp is Belgian mashed potato with a vegetable mashed through it, usually carrot, leek, spinach or Brussels sprout, and it is served under a sausage, a meatball or a piece of fish. The vegetable is not a garnish. It goes in until the potato takes its colour, and the texture stays deliberately rough.

It is farmhouse food, and Brussels never let go of it. Order stoemp-saucisse in a brasserie and you get one thick sausage, a spoonful of mustard and a mound of stoemp, and that is the whole plate. The sausage varies: a plain white braadworst, a smoked one, or black pudding.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Fin de Siècle, Rue des Chartreux 9, 1000 Brussels, roughly 600 m (0.4 mi) from the Grand Place. It serves stoemp-saucisse the traditional way and stays open from midday to midnight. Two warnings that will save your evening: it takes no reservations, so expect to queue, and it takes no cards, so bring cash. The menu is written on a blackboard.

10. Vol-au-vent

Vol-au-vent is a puff pastry case with the lid cut off, filled with chicken, mushrooms and small meatballs in a cream sauce, and in Belgium it is a full main course rather than an appetiser. It comes with fries, croquettes or mashed potato.

The name belongs to the pastry, and France serves it as a small snack. Belgium made it dinner: a Belgian vol-au-vent is the size of a side plate, the sauce is thick enough to hold a fork upright, and the meatballs are part of the filling rather than a garnish.

Where to eat it: ‘t Cuyperke, Stationsstraat 19, Zaventem, about 12 km (7.5 mi) east of central Brussels and two stops from the airport. Vol-au-vent with a season salad and fries is €19 (about $20, £16) on the current menu, and the same kitchen does a Belgian stoofvlees for €20 (about $22, £17). In town, Les Petits Oignons at Rue de la Régence 25 is the sit-down alternative.

11. Chicons au gratin (gegratineerd witloof)

Chicons au gratin is Belgian endive wrapped in a slice of ham, laid in a dish under béchamel and grated cheese and baked until the top browns, and it is served with mashed potato. Belgian endive, chicon in French and witloof in Flemish, is grown in the dark so it stays white, and Belgium invented the method.

This is the dish most Belgians associate with a grandmother’s kitchen, mine included. She would take good ham, roll each slice around a whole head of endive, line them up in an oven dish, pour over the sauce and put it in. I have never liked endive, so there were always a couple of ham rolls left empty at one end of the dish for me. The bitterness is the point, and it is what the cheese and the ham are there to balance: if the endive tastes sharp, it has been cooked correctly.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Le Plattesteen, Rue du Marché au Charbon 41, 1000 Brussels, a corner brasserie that keeps chicon gratin on a Belgian menu alongside vol-au-vent and carbonnade, and opens early enough for breakfast. It is also a long-standing landmark of the city’s LGBTQIA+ quarter.

12. Filet américain and steak tartare

Filet américain is raw minced beef seasoned with capers, onions, mustard, mayonnaise, Tabasco and egg yolk, and in Belgium it is served as a soft spread rather than a formed steak. Steak tartare is the plated restaurant version of the same thing, and a kitchen that takes it seriously will mix it at your table so you can see every ingredient go in.

The two names confuse everyone abroad and nobody in Belgium. Américain is what you buy at a butcher and spread on bread; tartare is what a waiter builds in front of you. Fries come with both.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Les Petits Oignons, Rue de la Régence 25, 1000 Brussels, serves américain-frites as one of its house classics, a short walk from the Sablon. For the table-side version, Bistro Mathilda on Leopold II-laan in Ostend, about 115 km (71.5 mi) from Brussels, makes steak tartare prepared at the table its flagship dish and is listed in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide. It is a coast trip, not a city dinner, and worth building a day around.

13. Mitraillette

A mitraillette is half a baguette split lengthways and filled with fried meat, a portion of fries and a ladle of sauce, and it is eaten standing at the counter of the fritkot that made it. The name means “submachine gun”, which tells you roughly what it does to an appetite.

The meat is whatever the fryer has: a burger patty, a fricadelle, a merguez, a chicken schnitzel. The fries go on top of the meat, not beside it, and the sauce goes over the fries.

Where to eat it in Brussels: any friterie, not a restaurant. It is a fritkot item by definition, so pick the one with the queue and ask for a mitraillette with samurai sauce.

14. Martino sandwich (broodje martino)

A broodje martino is a baguette spread with filet américain raw beef and topped with onions, pickles, capers, anchovy and a shake of Tabasco, and it is sold cold from every sandwich bar in the country. It is the sandwich Belgians crave when they come home from a trip abroad.

I know several women who spent a pregnancy craving a martino precisely because raw beef was off the list, and several people who rank it just behind fries as the first thing to eat on landing home. It is sharp, salty and slightly aggressive, and no visitor ever orders it.

Where to eat it in Brussels: any broodjeszaak or sandwich bar, where it will be on the board under “martino”. Ask for it pikant if you want the full amount of Tabasco.

15. Paling in ‘t groen (anguilles au vert, eel in the green)

Paling in ‘t groen, anguilles au vert in French, is eel poached in a bright green sauce of parsley, watercress, sorrel, chervil and basil, and it is served with fries or bread. The herbs go in at the last moment so they keep their colour, which is why the sauce arrives an almost artificial green.

It is a Flemish dish rather than a Belgian one. Fishermen took eel out of the river Schelde near Antwerp and cooked it with whatever grew on the bank, and the recipe kept the improvisation: the herb mix is not fixed and every kitchen has its own. It has since moved into the smarter bistros, but the origin was as humble as food gets.

It is the dish here you are least likely to find anywhere else, and the one I would send a visitor to eat first.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Bij den Boer, Quai aux Briques 60, 1000 Brussels, on the old fish market by Sainte-Catherine. A fish restaurant that dates itself to 1942, it lists anguille au vert at €38 (about $41, £32) among its suggestions. Closed Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays, and worth booking. Outside the city, Victoria bij/chez Victorine at Marcel Félicéstraat 17 in Hoeilaart, about 14 km (8.7 mi) southeast of Brussels, has built its reputation on this one dish.

16. Lapin aux pruneaux (konijn met pruimen)

Lapin aux pruneaux is rabbit braised slowly with prunes until the sauce turns dark and sweet against the meat, and it is served with croquettes or fries. Some kitchens braise it in kriek or gueuze instead of stock, which pushes the sauce sour and is worth ordering if you see it.

It was a poor household’s Sunday dish for generations before chefs took it up, and it now sits on brasserie menus in both versions. The prunes are not a garnish: they break down into the sauce and are most of its body.

Where to eat it in Brussels: La Roue d’Or, Rue des Chapeliers 26, 1000 Brussels, a traditional brasserie about 100 m from the Grand Place with an all-Belgian card of roughly twenty classics and prices posted outside.

17. Asperges à la flamande

Asperges à la flamande is Belgian white asparagus in season from April to June, boiled and then dressed in melted butter with crumbled hard-boiled egg, lemon and parsley. It is served as a main course in its own right, sometimes with ham or croquettes beside it.

For those three months the country loses its head about asparagus, and it turns up as a starter, a main, a soup and in some places an ice cream. White asparagus is grown covered so it never greens, which is why it is sweeter, more tender and dearer than the green kind. You mash the egg into the butter at the table and roll each spear through it. Order it outside the season and you are eating imported asparagus, which is not the same dish.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Le Zinneke, Place de la Patrie 26, 1030 Schaerbeek, puts white asparagus Flemish-style on the menu for the spring season. It is the same address as the mussels and closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so check the season and the day before you travel out to Schaerbeek.

18. Caricoles (karakollen)

Caricoles, karakollen in Flemish, are sea snails simmered in a peppery broth with celery and bay and sold hot in a paper cup with a pin to pick them out. They are Brussels street food, not restaurant food, and they are one of the last survivors of the city’s old market cooking.

They are whelks and periwinkles rather than the garden snails you meet in France, and the broth matters more than the shellfish: heavily peppered, faintly herbal, and drunk from the cup once the snails are gone. Autumn and winter are the season.

Where to eat them in Brussels: the stalls at the city’s markets and fairs, which is where caricoles have always been sold. There is no fixed address to book, so keep an eye out for a hand-painted sign reading “caricoles” or “karakollen” when you pass a market square.

19. Speculoos (speculaas)

Speculoos is a thin, hard biscuit spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger, baked in carved wooden moulds for the feast of Saint Nicholas on 6 December, and now sold all year. It arrives on the saucer with almost every coffee served in Belgium.

It is often translated as gingerbread, which is wrong: gingerbread is soft and speculoos snaps. The shapes come from the moulds, which is why the biscuits carry Saint Nicholas, windmills and animals in relief. Speculoos paste, the spread made by grinding the biscuits, is a separate and much more recent invention.

Where to eat it in Brussels: Maison Dandoy, Rue Charles Buls 14, 1000 Brussels. Speculoos is what the house has made since 1829, and the tea room’s walls are hung with the antique moulds the biscuits were pressed in.

20. Smoutebollen (croustillons)

Smoutebollen, croustillons in French, are balls of yeast dough deep-fried and buried in icing sugar, sold hot in a paper tray from a fairground stall. They are Belgium’s fair and Christmas-market food, and they are essentially a doughnut without the hole.

The name means “lard balls”, which is what they were fried in. Eat them within a couple of minutes, before the sugar goes damp, and accept that you will be wearing some of it. Winter is the season, and the Brussels Christmas market sells them by the tray.

Where to eat them in Brussels: any funfair or Christmas market stall. Restaurants do not sell them.

What to drink in Brussels

The two drinks to order in Brussels are Belgian beer, which UNESCO added to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016, and jenever, the juniper spirit that came before gin.

Belgian beer: Trappist, abbey, lambic, gueuze and kriek

Belgian beer is not one style but several families, and the one that belongs to Brussels is lambic. Lambic is fermented spontaneously, with wild yeasts that live in the air of the Zenne valley around the city, and it is left in wooden barrels for one to three years. It comes out flat, sour and nothing like a lager.

The rest of the terms describe what happens to lambic next. Gueuze is a blend of young and old lambic, bottled and refermented, and it fizzes like champagne. Kriek is lambic steeped on sour cherries. Faro is lambic sweetened with sugar. Separately, Trappist beers are brewed inside a Trappist abbey under the monks’ supervision, and abbey beers use a monastic name and recipe without the abbey. Order a Westmalle Tripel or a Chimay if you want the Trappist side, a Cantillon gueuze if you want the Brussels one.

Where to drink it in Brussels: Brasserie Cantillon, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht. A family brewery that has made lambic, gueuze, kriek and faro on the same premises since 1900, and which doubles as the Brussels Museum of the Gueuze. You walk through a working brewery rather than a display, and the tour ends with a tasting. It is the one beer address in the city worth planning a morning around.

Jenever

Jenever is a juniper-flavoured grain spirit from the Low Countries, and it is the ancestor of gin rather than a version of it. It is served in a small tulip-shaped glass filled to the brim, which is why the first sip is taken with your hands behind your back and your mouth going to the glass.

It comes in jonge and oude styles, which describe the distilling method rather than the age, plus dozens of flavoured versions from vanilla to speculoos, and it is a protected regional product of Belgium and the Netherlands. In Belgium it is above all a Christmas drink: where German markets run on Glühwein, Belgian Christmas markets have stalls selling nothing else. The country’s Jenevermuseum is in Hasselt, in a former distillery.

More Belgian food worth trying

Listed below are eight more Belgian specialities worth ordering if you see them, each named by its region of origin.

• Jambon d’Ardenne: dry-cured, lightly smoked ham from the Ardennes forest in southern Belgium, served in thin slices with bread.
• Herve cheese: a soft washed-rind cow’s cheese from the Pays de Herve, pungent enough to be an event, traditionally eaten with sirop de Liège.
• Maredsous: a semi-soft abbey cheese from Namur province, made alongside the abbey’s beer.
• Sirop de Liège: a thick apple-and-pear syrup from the Liège region, used in boulets and spread on bread with bacon or cheese.
• Dame blanche: vanilla ice cream under hot dark chocolate sauce, the standard Belgian dessert, on almost every brasserie card.
• Cuberdon: a cone-shaped Ghent sweet with a hard shell and a syrupy raspberry centre, sold from purple street carts.
• Mattentaart: a small round puff-pastry tart from Geraardsbergen filled with curdled milk and almond, and a protected regional product.
• Tarte au riz: a Verviers rice-pudding tart, sold by the slice in every bakery in Wallonia.

Where to eat Belgian food in Brussels: the address list

Every restaurant, counter and fritkot named in this guide is listed below by the Brussels neighbourhood you will be standing in.

Grand Place and the city centre

• Maison Dandoy Tea Room, Rue Charles Buls 14, 1000 Brussels. Waffles and speculoos.
• La Roue d’Or, Rue des Chapeliers 26, 1000 Brussels. Rabbit with prunes, mussels, Belgian classics.
• Ballekes Grand Place, Rue des Chapeliers 3, 1000 Brussels. Meatballs, no reservations.
• Café Novo, Place de la Vieille Halle aux Blés 37, 1000 Brussels. Carbonnade, stoemp, vegetarian options.
• Le Plattesteen, Rue du Marché au Charbon 41, 1000 Brussels. Chicons au gratin, vol-au-vent, carbonnade.

Sainte-Catherine and the old fish market

• Noordzee / Mer du Nord, Rue Sainte-Catherine 45, 1000 Brussels. Grey shrimp croquettes, standing only.
• Bij den Boer, Quai aux Briques 60, 1000 Brussels. Eel in the green, North Sea fish.
• Ballekes Sainte-Catherine, Rue Sainte-Catherine 37, 1000 Brussels. Meatballs.
• Fin de Siècle, Rue des Chartreux 9, 1000 Brussels. Stoemp-saucisse, stews. Cash only, no bookings.

Sablon and Marolles

• Les Petits Oignons, Rue de la Régence 25, 1000 Brussels. Grey shrimp croquettes, américain-frites.
• Pierre Marcolini, Place du Grand Sablon. Pralines and single-origin bars.
• Le Bistro – Porte de Hal, Boulevard de Waterloo 138, 1000 Brussels. Mussels, stews, croquettes.

Etterbeek, Schaerbeek, Anderlecht and Koekelberg

• Maison Antoine, Place Jourdan 1, 1040 Etterbeek. Fries since 1948.
• Le Zinneke, Place de la Patrie 26, 1030 Schaerbeek. Mussels and Flemish asparagus. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
• Brasserie Cantillon, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht. Lambic and gueuze, brewery and museum.
• Frederic Blondeel, Rue de Ganshoren 39, 1081 Koekelberg. Chocolate atelier and coffee roastery.

Outside Brussels

• ‘t Cuyperke, Stationsstraat 19, Zaventem. About 12 km (7.5 mi) east. Vol-au-vent.
• Victoria bij/chez Victorine, Marcel Félicéstraat 17, Hoeilaart. About 14 km (8.7 mi) southeast. Eel in the green.
• Bistro Mathilda, Leopold II-laan, Ostend. About 115 km (71.5 mi) west. Steak tartare at the table, in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide.

One more address is worth naming even though it serves none of the twenty dishes in their everyday form: Comme Chez Soi, Place Rouppe 23, 1000 Brussels, which has been open since 1926 and holds one star in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide Belgium. Book weeks ahead. For a wider city list, read our guide to the 15 best restaurants in Brussels.

Where not to eat in Brussels

Two places take more money from visitors than anywhere else in the city, and both are avoidable.

Rue des Bouchers. The lane of seafood displays off the Grand Place, where waiters step into the street to bring you in. The mussels are not fresh, the service is rushed and the bill is larger than it should be. Walk five minutes on to Sainte-Catherine, where the fish restaurants are the real ones.

The waffle shops around the Grand Place. A Belgian waffle costs a few euros and is eaten plain or with icing sugar. The versions sold on that square are loaded with cream, sauce, fruit and sprinkles, priced accordingly, and made from industrial dough. Rue Charles Buls is two minutes away.

Brussels food tours

The Brussels food tours below each cover several dishes from this guide in one walk, which is the fastest way to eat six of them in a day. Prices and durations change, so check the current figure on the booking page before you commit.

Four Brussels food tours worth booking, and what each one feeds you, are listed below.

1. Brussels Food Tour with Chocolate, Beer, Waffle and Sightseeing. A four-hour walking tour around the Grand Place with a Belgian lunch, a chocolate tasting and a beer tasting. Book it here.
2. Brussels Chocolate Workshop and Guided Walking Tour. A three-and-a-half-hour tour of chocolate boutiques with praline and truffle tastings, ending in a workshop where you make your own with a chocolatier. Book it here.
3. Brussels Belgian Chocolate, Beer and Fries Tasting Tour. A three-hour tasting tour of chocolate, beer and fries around the Grand Place and Sainte-Catherine. Book it here.
4. Brussels Private Food Tour with 10 Tastings. A three-hour private walk with a local guide through street food, shops, a market and an old-fashioned café. Book it here.

Frequently asked questions about Belgian food in Brussels

The questions travellers ask most often about Belgian food in Brussels are answered below, each in one sentence.

What is Brussels’ national dish?

Moules-frites, mussels steamed in white wine and served with fries, is the dish Brussels is identified with and is on the menu of almost every brasserie in the city.

What is a typical Brussels meal?

A typical Brussels meal is one main course of meat or fish with fries and a sauce, most often carbonnade à la flamande, waterzooi, vol-au-vent or moules-frites, with a Belgian beer chosen to match it.

What is the famous food in Brussels?

Brussels is known for moules-frites, Belgian fries from a fritkot, both styles of Belgian waffle and Belgian pralines, and the dish most tied to the city itself is moules-frites.

What is the Belgian national dish?

Moules-frites is treated as Belgium’s national dish, though carbonnade à la flamande and Belgian fries are cited almost as often, and no dish holds the title officially.

What is a must eat in Belgium?

The dish to eat before you leave Belgium is a cone of fries from a fritkot with andalouse or samurai sauce, because it is the one thing that is measurably better here than anywhere else.

What is a typical dinner in Belgium?

A typical Belgian dinner is a single main course of stewed or grilled meat with fries or stoemp and a sauce, eaten early, with a beer rather than wine.

What are some popular street foods in Belgium?

The street foods to look for in Belgium are fries from a fritkot, the mitraillette, the martino sandwich, caricoles from a market stall, waffles from a van and smoutebollen at a fair.

What is Belgium famous for food?

Belgium is famous for chocolate, beer, waffles and fries, and beyond those four it is a country of stews: carbonnade, waterzooi, boulets and rabbit with prunes.

What are the best Belgian recipes to cook yourself?

The Belgian recipes that work at home are the stews and the simple assemblies, and the eight easiest are listed below in the order a beginner should try them.

1. Carbonnade à la flamande: beef in dark Belgian beer, thickened with mustard bread.
2. Chicken vol-au-vent: puff pastry cases filled with chicken, mushrooms and meatballs.
3. Waterzooi: chicken, root vegetables, cream and egg yolk in a broth.
4. Chicons au gratin: endive rolled in ham under béchamel and cheese.
5. Steak tartare: raw minced beef with shallots, pickles and capers.
6. Asperges à la flamande: white asparagus with butter and crumbled egg.
7. Salade liégeoise: warm potato salad with green beans, bacon and vinegar.
8. Dame blanche: vanilla ice cream under hot chocolate sauce.

Every one of them needs ingredients you can buy outside Belgium, apart from the beer. Our collection of Belgian recipes gives the quantities, the timings and the beer to use for the carbonnade.

What else should I know before eating my way around Brussels?

Two things: brasseries serve dinner earlier than in southern Europe, so aim for 19:00 rather than 21:00, and several of the addresses in this guide take no cards. If you want context beyond the food, read our facts about Brussels and our list of things to do in Brussels.

About the authors. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, who is Belgian, and the first-person notes in this guide are hers, from the endive her grandmother baked to the samurai sauce she still orders on her fries. It was written with Alison Cornford-Matheson, a Canadian travel writer and photographer who founded Cheeseweb.eu and wrote The Foodie Guide to Brussels: Local Tips for Restaurants, Shops, Hotels, and Activities after years of eating her way through the city. The team covers Belgium for independent travellers, including the restaurants, fritkots, chocolate shops and food tours worth the trip, and updates this page when addresses, seasons and prices change. If a place on this list has changed, tell us and we will go and check.